Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Second Thoughts about What Pat Robertson Said

What is wrong with what Robertson said is what is wrong with a great deal of religious thinking. Explaining wherein the fault lies is not easy.

William Blake, Job

I have some emendations to make to my previous
entry, on Pat
Robertson’s theological explanation of the sorrows of Haiti.

(1) In that entry, I
observed that, for all the outcry against Robertson’s remarks, there
has
been almost no
discussion of what exactly makes them so
outrageous. Subsequently, I discovered a piece by Lisa
Miller, published in Newsweek
on line under the sardonic title “Why
God Hates Haiti,” that addresses the
question that I had thought neglected. After a brief account of Haiti’s
history of misfortune, Miller comments as follows on Robertson’s
remarks:

In his narrow, malicious way, Robertson is making a First
Commandment argument: when the God of Israel thunders from his
mountaintop that “you shall have no other gods before me,” he means it.
This God rains down disaster—floods and so forth—on those who disobey.

But Robertson’s is a fundamentalist view. It’s so unkind and
self-righteous—and deaf, dumb, and blind to centuries of theological
discourse on suffering by thinkers from Augustine to Elie Wiesel—that
one might easily call it backward. Every Western religious tradition
teaches that mortals have no way of counting or weighing another’s
sin.

I was heartened to read this piece, for two reasons. First, it goes
beyond a mere emotional reaction to Robertson’s
remarks to address issues of the nature and consequences of religious
belief, as I think that one must do to bring to light what it
is about those remarks that makes them deserving of condemnation.
Second, it reminds us that
Robertson’s remarks are deplorable even in a religious
perspective—perhaps especially so. Not just any old religious outlook
will lead one to the conclusion that Haiti’s afflictions are the
consequences of Haitians’ having done things displeasing to God, not
even if you throw in Robertson’s ignorant and bigoted identification of
the Creole religion of (some) Haitians with a Satanic cult. No; it
takes, in Miller’s apt word, a particularly backward theology to do
that. (Ignorant, bigoted, backward, arrogant, callous, inhumane,
smug, fatuous—one thing for which you have to give Pat Robertson
credit is that he provides work for lots of adjectives!)

(2) It was rash of me to dismiss Robertson’s purported “true story”
about a pact with the devil as “just more of
the sort of lurid fantasy habitually extruded by the brains of
right-wing religious fanatics like [him].” It is surely something
more baneful than that. I offered the surmise
that “in [Robertson’s]
view any religious practice much different from the Evangelical
Protestantism with which he is comfortable is Satanic worship.” That
may be so, but it does not take account of the fact that the Haitians
are of largely
black African origin, as is the Vodou religion whose rites Robertson
equates with Satanism. It is possible that Robertson’s
bigotry is purely religious and not racial in nature, but, I think, not
likely.
The suggestion of an underlying racial bias adds to the ugliness
of his remarks.

(3) I think that I was a bit glib about the relation between
believing in God and the habit of attributing specific events to divine
designs. I took for granted that the latter
is separable from the former—that it is possible to believe in God
while forswearing all judgments about divine intentions behind worldly
events. Certainly the two are separable in principle. But the fact
(assuming it to be a fact, as I think it is) that the vast majority of
religious believers make such judgments is an indication of how
difficult it is to have the one without the other. To believe that
everything that happens does so in accordance with divine providence
while making no judgments about how specific events bear a
providential meaning would surely greatly reduce the comforts of
religious life for most believers. On this point as on many others, the
more that religious
belief is purged of irrational elements, the less emotional
appeal it can hold for most people.

(4) In my attempt to account for what was outrageous
in Robertson’s remarks, I think I conflated two questions that require
separate answers: (a) what
principle led Robertson to such conclusions? and (b) what
makes his conclusions so obnoxious? I would still say that his remarks
rest on a presumption on his part of being able to identify God’s
designs in worldly affairs.
That presumption, combined with his bigoted assessment of Haitian
history (see point (2) above), led Robertson to the conclusion that
Haiti’s misfortunes are the
return on a Satanic bargain, whether they are effected by Satan himself
as part of the deal or by God in retribution for the original pact. The same
presumption plainly underlies Robertson’s grandiose,
politically opportunistic explanations of the September 11 attacks, the
flooding of New Orleans, the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, and the
incapacitation of Ariel Sharon by a stroke (all explained in the previous
entry).

But what makes such
conclusions obnoxious is something more. It is, as Lisa Miller points
out in the passage that I quoted earlier (see (1) above), the
presumption of being able to identify and weigh the sins of
others—always, of course, with favor to oneself and disfavor to the
others. Robertson embraces a religious doctrine according to which
believers of said doctrine are deserving of God’s favor and
non-believers deserving of
divine retribution. To say that such a view is baseless, superstitious,
or implausible (all of which I say it is) fails to touch on what is
most deplorable about it, namely its self-serving arrogance and
presumption. Robertson’s conclusions are certainly generated by faults
of reasoning and judgment, but what is most objectionable in them is a
matter of the human posture that emerges from his faulty reasonings and
judgments. (I acknowledge that what I have written is not entirely
clear; it seems to me that the question that I have been trying to
answer—what is so outrageous about Robertson’s remarks?—does not yield to the familiar terms of either ethics or logic as commonly practiced.)

(5) A further point to be made about the evil done by Robertson and
those who share his fondness for imputing earthly disasters to divine
causes is that they reinforce a lack of interest in the demonstrable
natural causes of such disasters and thereby reduce the likelihood of
remedy. Elizabeth McAlister sums the matter up well in a piece for CNN
titled “Why
Does Haiti Suffer So Much?” (January 18, 2010):

For social scientists, there is nothing metaphysical about the
question “Why Haiti?” Longstanding structural reasons have produced a
dysfunctional system long in crisis. Beginning as a French slave
society, the nation was founded at a severe disadvantage. France
demanded enormous payment for abandoned property after the revolution,
starting a cycle of debt that was never broken.

Deep and abiding
racism prevented the U.S. and Europe from recognizing Haiti for 60
years. Trade was never established on even terms. The military ruled
the state, culminating in the brutal Duvalier dictatorship, which the
U.S. supported.

No robust civil society developed—there’s no
vigorous tradition of PTAs and town planning boards. A brain drain
evacuated top talent from the country, while the U.S.-subsidized farm
industry sent surplus crops to Haiti, undercutting local prices there.
Farmers abandoned their lands, flocked to the capital, and built the
shanty towns that have now collapsed into rubble, burying the innocent
and vulnerable, strong and powerful alike.

The suffering Haitians are enduring is a natural disaster worsened
by
human-made conditions.

Robertson cited the disparity between the comparatively good
fortunes
of the Dominican Republic, on the eastern half of the island of
Hispaniola, and the terrible ill fortunes of the Republic of Haiti, on
the western half of the same island, as evidence of the supernatural
causation of Haiti’s misfortunes—as if no natural explanation were
possible. The more that people embrace this kind of superstitious
thinking, the less likely it is that anything will ever be done about
the actual causes of suffering. (Chances are bad enough; that is no
excuse for making them worse.) An earthquake is an uncontrollable
natural event; the substandard
building
construction that makes an earthquake fatal to tens of
thousands of people is not. Heavy rains are an uncontrollable natural
event; the deforestation
that makes such rains result in deadly landslides is not. And so on.

(6) Finally, no discussion of religious responses to the disaster in
Haiti can be complete without some consideration of the Book of Job.
Lisa Miller’s piece opens with the sentence: “Haiti is surely a Job
among nations.” Subsequently, she quotes Rabbi Harold Kushner, the author
of When Bad Things Happen to Good People
(New York: Anchor Books, 1981), which is among other things a
meditation on the Book of Job. (What Kushner is quoted as saying, by
the way, is: “I think that it’s supreme hubris to think you can read
God's mind.” I was struck by the fact that the rabbi chose the Greek
“hubris” rather than the Hebrew “chutzpah.” But on reflection, I
saw the justice of the choice: only the Greek word denotes a
transgression upon divine prerogatives, the Heberew word signifying only a
transgression upon human ones.) Plainly, if Haiti is a Job, then
Robertson is a Job’s comforter of the worst sort. Kushner in his book
provides a useful schema for understanding what that means:

To try to understand the book [viz., Job] and its answer, let us
take
note of three statements which everyone in the book, and most of the
readers, would like to be able to believe:

A. God is all-powerful and causes everything that happens in the
world. Nothing happens without His willing it.

B. God is just and fair, and stands for people getting what they
deserve, so that the good prosper and the wicked are punished.

C. Job is a good person.

As long as Job is health and wealthy, we can believe all three of
those
statements at the same time with no difficulty. When Job suffers, when
he loses his possessions, his family, and his health, we have a
problem. We can no longer make sense of all three propositions
together. We can now affirm any two only by denying the
third. . . .

Job’s friends are prepared to stop believing (C), the assertion
that
Job is a good person. (42–43)

A characteristic of the author of When
Bad
Things Happen to Good People
that impresses the reader from the
beginning is his humanity—a characteristic
not universal among bearers of clerical titles, as recent events remind
us. In the first chapter of the book, titled “Why Do the Righteous
Suffer?”, Kushner disposes of the familiar attempts to reconcile the
sufferings of the innocent and the just with belief in God—“They did
something to deserve it,” “It’s for their own good,” “It’s for the best
in
the long run,” “God will make it up to them in the next life,” and so
on—not so much for being unconvincing answers to a theoretical
conundrum (though he does find them to be that) as for failing to offer
the afflicted a possibility for reconciliation with God. His
alternative solution is that God does
not cause or allow all of our suffering: some things really do just
happen, for no divinely providential reason at all. In terms of the
schema above, Kushner gives up statement (A).
In theological terms, he gives up the doctrines of divine
omnipotence and providence: “God can’t do everything,” he says in the
title of his seventh chapter (although, he adds, “he can do some
important things”).

As strongly as Kushner’s ethos
appeals to me, and as humane as I find his theological view, his
attempt to derive the latter from the Book of Job seems to me to have
little textual foundation. To me, the view implied by the Book of Job
is just the view that Kushner attributes to Job himself:

Job sees God as being above notions of fairness, being so powerful
that no moral rules apply to Him. God is seen as resembling an Oriental
potentate, with unchallenged power over the life and property of his
subjects. And in fact, the old fable of Job [i.e., the folk tale
posited by biblical scholars as the antecedent of the scriptural text]
does picture God in just that way, as a deity who afflicts Job without
any moral qualms in order to test his loyalty, and who feels that He
has “made it up” to Job afterward by rewarding him lavishly. (46–47)

This is, in fact, the only view of God that I find in the text. To
me it seems that God figuratively picks Job up by the scruff of the
neck and thunders at him, “Can you compare your powers to mine? No, you
can’t! So shut up!” (38:1–40:2
and 40:6–41:26);
to
which
Job meekly
replies, “Yes, Sir; I will, Sir” (40:3–5
and 42:1–6).
The theological lesson taught by God’s answer to Job, so far as I can
tell, is either that divine might makes right or that God’s power is so
far beyond our comprehension that it is senseless for us to apply our
notions of justice to God. If any of the three propositions in
Kushner’s scheme is to be given up, it must proposition (B), that God
is just—not because it is false, but because when we attribute justice
to God, we really have no idea of what we are talking about. Kushner
takes the passage about Leviathan (40:25–41:26)
to
mean,
literally, that God
is only able with great effort to subdue the giant sea serpent, and
thus to mean, figuratively, that “even God has a hard time keeping
chaos in check and limiting the damage that evil can do” (49–50).
Rabbi, you’re a mentsh for trying to find such
a humane view in scripture, but I just
don’t see it there.